Jackass Critics

Film and DVD Reviews.

Capturing the Friedmans review by The Grim Ringler

It has been
said that reality television began many, many years ago when PBS took cameras
into the lives of a family made a day-by-day documentary about the life of that
family. As it turned out, it also became the first videography of a family
collapsing under the weight of its own misery. But I think it could be argued
that reality television and that voyeuristic lust began with the advent of home
video technology. When we were able to buy a personal filmmaking device and
could take it home and make home movies, thats where it all began. And sure,
this technology has spawned an ocean of todays filmmakers (even I made movies
with my friends when I was a teenager), but after seeing this film, I have to
wonder how many people also caught on film the slow death of what had once been
a family. Capturing everything in aching detail.

Capturing the Friedmans is a
very grim documentary film, which tells the tale of the Friedman family of
Nassau County, New York. Using a great deal of footage shot by the family
itself, much of this footage shot by the father at first and then one of the
three sons, it captures the slow decay and destruction of a family that must
deal with the unthinkable allegations of child molestation which come at
first against the father, and then the middle son. Beginning at first as just a
bittersweet homage to a family that fell apart, showing clips the father filmed
of birthdays, of dinners, of skits the boys put on, each shot in the very
infancy of home video, but as the clips get newer and newer, entering into the eighties
and the advent of videocassettes, the story takes a very unexpected dark turn. The
father, Arnie, is caught in a child pornography sting in the mid-eighties when
he is receives and then sends a magazine depicting sex acts with young boys. On
a search of the family house several more magazines are found as well, and the
police believe this to be everything. On a whim, one of the officers also takes
into evidence a list of students that Arnie had been teaching a computer class
to in the family basement. When the police investigate this list they come up
with several stories from the students that Arnie and his son Jesse, then a
teenager, had molested and brutalized many of the children he had been teaching
in the family home and both Arnie and his son are taken into custody. What we
then are shown are bits of archived television news footage, interviews with a
supposed victim (shown now laying across a couch and giving us the first seeds
of suspicion about the case against Arnie and his son), several people who
insist nothing happened in that basement, the people who arrested the men, and
most importantly, the family itself. Its a harrowing tale showing a family
ripped apart. When Arnie and his son are on trial the son David, the eldest of
the three, begins filming the familial deterioration, the boys taking their
fathers side and insisting that he is innocent while the mother, now faced
with the idea that the man she was with for so many years is, if nothing else,
a pedophile, cannot say the same with any certainty. And it is her fear at what
her husband may be which seems to tear the family apart, though its obvious
during the personal interviews that more was going on in that house for all
those years. The most macabre thing in the film may well be two sequences, the
first which shows the night before Arnie is set to go to prison and he is enjoying
one last night at home, and the second is when Jesse, also pleading guilty to
the charges against him (for fear that he would never get a fair trial, his
father pleading guilty in the foolish hope that itd spare his son from going
down with him), is about to enter his guilty plea. What we see then is a family
in denial. Laughing and mugging for the cameras as they had for all those
years, the joy now gone from their actions and a despairing act of all is well
being played out. The final video shot by and for the family is of Jesse
dancing and putting on a skit as he and his brothers await his trial and his
sentencing, the grim nature of this scene eluding no one in the courthouse we
soon learn from the interviews. And while the heart of the film lies with the home
movies that were made, more of the truth about the case and about the family
itself comes out in the interviews. A mother/wife who never seemed to know her
husband and who seems to have lead her husband and son astray in pushing them
to plead guilty to charges they insisted were baseless. Arnies brother (who
Arnie had told his wife and an independent investigator he had had a sexual
relationship with as a child) who insists his brother is innocent. A son,
David, who blames his mother for pulling the family apart, too wrapped up in
his own fictitious memory of his father that he cannot even admit that his
father deserved to be in prison, whether he was guilty of the charges or not
(we learn other information that damns him to this end). And the son that paid
for all of it Jesse. This is both a ghost story and a horror film, showing what
happens when the darkest of desires and lusts begin first to devour their
master, and then everything else it can, from family to community and on.

This is a very hard film to watch, not
because it is either graphic or sensationalistic but because you never leave
with a sense of what the truth really is and whether the justice was fully
served. And watching the death of a family is not something you should ever want
to see. To see how much David hates his mother, and the denial he has about
his father is heartbreaking. As is the shame and anger that Elaine, the mother
holds in her still, as if she feels she might have stopped horrors that may not
have happened. And thats the hell of it, you never know quite what happened.
To hear the facts in the case it is hard to say that Arnie and his son are
guilty of what they are charged with. It is obvious from what you learn that
Arnie was a sick man and had done things which warranted his prison sentence,
whether he wanted to believe that or not, but it is hard for me to say,
especially when faced with the interviews of one alleged victim and the parent
of one that insists nothing happened as well as other students who insist the
same, that anything happened in that family basement. But its also hard
to dismiss it all when you have a man that was as troubled and sick as Arnie
obviously was.

As a portrait of the American Family
as a wounded and dying beast, it doesnt get much grimmer than this. And two
things I really like and admire about the film is that the director only
interjects a couple of times - never making the film about himself (a thing
which helps the film and family tell its own story), and never once do you get
an easy answer. The director managed, somehow to keep themselves focused not on
the guilt or innocence of Arnie and his son but on the devastation their
convictions caused the family. The film does falter though in that you never
really get to know the people before you know their dark pasts. You only get to
sort of know them at the end of the film, which I am sure was a editorial
decision made to reveal all towards the end, but its hard to care about these
people when all you see is their anger, resentment, and the horror of what they
lived through.

A very good, if dark, documentary and
a very well made film. Its one of those that is almost hard to recommend in
that what is revealed about Arnie (and perhaps the things in his past that
helped to create him and if you follow that, what those things DIDNT do to
make his brother the same as he) is very hard to know how to process. He was a
monster waiting to be born, and all we can do is wonder what horrors he did do.
Its a great movie but again, I think some of the editorial notions hurt the
film, as well as the fact that towards the middle of the film it feels as if
the director is not sure whether he wants to focus the film on the family or
the trial or both. If you are into documentaries though, this is a must
see. If you are just a casual fan of documentaries this may be one you want to
sit out. No matter what though, you will walk away from the film with a lot of
uncomfortable questions floating around your brain.